MOTHER – National Gallery of Victoria

I followed a young family in. A big Madonna and Child, a 15th century painting by Giovanni di Francesco Toscani below woven pieces by Elizabeth Djutarra. The kid goes, “Mum, it’s the Mona Lisa!”… to which dad replies, “The Mona Lisa’s in Paris, mate.” The kid then asked to go watch “the movie” (???). I was closely ambushed by three prammed-up women and their crying young the whole way through after the family left, so I guess something was in the air to lure in the mothers and the mothered.

Hannah Wilke asked once, “If women have failed to make ‘universal’ art because we're trapped within the ‘personal,’ why not universalise the ‘personal’ and make it the subject of our art?”

This exhibition might be a curatorial realisation of that. If anything is universal, it is the experience of being a mother or a child of a mother. Each work is intimate: Sophie Calle’s giraffe for her lost mother, Christine Godden’s 1974 images of homebirths, stories of the Stolen Generation in John Packham’s Petin – to abduct, steal (1999).

This being said, MOTHER is also Cats and Dogs-style collection-pull populism, but in a less populist way. The Western/Indigenous dichotomy that the curators establish at the beginning is a bit too bitey; you essentially walk into the gallery and ‘choose’ to turn left (Virgin of the Adoption, 1858) or right (I am Banggal, 1994). The wall text leans heavily on this divide, and important works are sometimes pushed into odd corners.

Julie Vinci – The Piss Painting – Oddaný

The miscreant; the anthropomorphic woman, in the public forum, pissing (‘using the restrum’) wherever her body desires. Discarded underpaintings read as discarded piss positions—the nervous fluster of a full bladder, knee-to-knee suppressions giving out in the subject’s full and final render. The artists wears the same stripes as in her paintings. Why isn’t she peeing too? I once read a book called Woo Woo, set Northside about an artist whose exhibition opening ended in her performance/psychic break as a pig. Maybe painting on it's own cannot really be true praxis... Vinci’s paintings are transgression’s stencil. I want to see her mark!

Dragging through – Conners Conners

I’m not exactly sure what the curators of this new show were talking about when they titled it Dragging through, but I assume it’s a reference to the idiomatic expression involving names and mud. If mud wasn’t their chosen substance, we see all the other possible forms of pejorative goop upon entrance in Oscar Elms’ Biggest indie party in Fitzroy (2026). The aftermath of a studio-visit-gone-wrong, Elms’ work would kill a Victorian child and every perpetrator of the Fitzroy garage sesh in one single viewing. Uniquely VCA detritus like Gamsol, pens, Fear and Loathing, and black gesso (or tar?) make up the scene. It’s a riot, it’s a party, it’s a painting in the expanded field!

The fantasy of Elms’ night is kept alive in Love is our canvas, lets splash some paint (2026) by Milly James. Bright bright neon yellow swathes of oil paint are spread across canvas and embellished with chux wipes (cloth) and alfoil (silver leaf). If I was initially right, and this show is about mud, I can’t help but think of James’ work as a cosmopolitan reduction of Gutai artist Kazuo Shiraga Challenging the Mud (1955), in which Shiraga wrestled with the titular muck in his undies.Performed three years after the dissolution of Japanese fascism, a similar chord can be drawn between the unrestrained, often grimy and rebellious spirit of these works and their negotiation of authority; snuggling the meeting point of bureaucracy and anarchy, Conners Conners is a small non-profit gallery embedded within Fitzroy Town Hall, cohabiting—somewhat absurdly—with the suburbs’ police force.

Anyway. I’m drawing probably meaningless comparisons and tangential thoughts. For the sixth iteration of the gallery’s annual exhibition for emerging artists, there is definitely though a guiding thread dragging me through the mire. It continues in Ignatz Cady Freer’s three works, whose titles all reference epidemiology: Pestilence (YMCA) (2026), Self Portrait At 8 Years Old After Recovering From Croup (Collaborative Frame With My Neighbours 4 Year Old) (2026), and Syphilitic Ulceration Of The Nose (The French Disease) (2026).Affectively nostalgic, the 53x43cm frames are formally naïve but capture the brilliant self-awareness of a hypochondriacal schoolchild. Disease appears as an inflamed (admittedly disturbing) muzzle in penline. I begin to think of how pest and pestilence are etymological cousins, how disease mongers fear—misread in the advent of the AIDS epidemic, resurfacing in the panic of SARS, lingering wherever bodies are made suspect. The artist maybe wants me to not be disturbed by the messed up nose. Not too sure. Formally, Freer’s drawings aren’t really visually compelling, but I can get around the frames, which are wooden and drilled straight into the wall with two big screws each and decorated with scribble. They’re messy and remind me of being snotty nosed at the Steiner school I attended from ages 4 to 10.

The abject and the playfully grotesque are offset by the remaining works in the show which embody a refined sanctity; the heaven-sent roommate who finishes James’ failed chux-wipe attempt to clean the aftermath of Elms’ party. Party v parents. Kostas Pavlidis’ Lamp #1-#3 (2026) are not actually lamps, but stained-glass cases. The first one reads as industrial and mildly ecclesiastical, maybe the siphoned offcuts of St Paul’s cathedral. Gemma Topliss’ sculpture on the adjacent gallery wall is a matte black, wall-mounted relief composed of interlocking curved and cylindrical forms, arranged with a strict, almost mechanical symmetry. Its scalloped upper register and repeated grooves recall the ridged body of a frog güiro.

A mud vs meticulousness binary feels obvious to me, and so too do its exceptions... I’m really nearing the end of my effort for this writing so I’ll keep it short from here on in. In the centre of the second gallery sits a sculpture of a soccer ball by Jesse Deng from over at HAIR. Its made from bronze, and is both play and seriousness in tandem. A kick of that would hurt. Just bit my tongue (keyboard) and stopped myself from writing 'Ouch!' Above the sculpture, a roughly two-by-three metre canvas by Chelsea Young looms: monumental, featuring the blood and gore of a crushed beetle, which sits idly by a belladonna in bold acrylic hues. The painting is in her signature visual language, with its subject transporting me back in time to her portrait of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty at Cathedral Cabinet last year.

There's something to be said here of the collapse between chaos/order, art/law, play/discipline... but Rosalind is a belladonna too, and all beautiful women deserve their beauty sleep.

Hazel Walker Walsh – Precious – Cathedral Cabinet

My initial thought was along the lines of Rauschenberg’s extension of the canvas question in Monogram (1955–59); i.e. his invented third-thinged inbrededness of sculpture/painting/craft. But placing his chauvinistic rhetoric on a piece titled ‘Precious,’ which hangs in Cathedral Cabinet like a lovely trail of over-ripened grapes, or the remnant paper-mache balloons of a school fete, felt wrong… so scratch all that (kind of). It’s quietly a little twee—which is perhaps why I like it.

Who is she?